A. Europe Transformed: Explaining the New Imperialism
1. Technology
-Ironclad warships with steam turbines now spread the power of far more advanced and deadly European weaponry overseas, while the invention of the telegraph radically simplified the logistics of military mobilization from afar
2. Nationalism
-Propelled the new imperialism forward toward a more strident, aggressive, and exclusionary variant
-Now linked to the emergence of new mass politics on the right
3. Economic Factors
-Turn of the century imperial nations viewed their colonies as vital markets for selling European industrial goods, buying raw materials and cash crops, and investing surplus capital
-Germany and the United States were leading industrial powers
-Both Germany and the US had surpassed British steel and iron production and Germany was outselling the British in certain overseas markets
-Industrial depression from 1873 to the early 1890s
-Unstable economic context prompted the view that colonial markets could act as buffers against the fluctuations of global commerce
-Abandon the rhetoric of free trade and endorsed mercantilist policies that—in addition to raising trade barriers in the domestic market—explicitly demarcated the colonies as protected economic spheres
-European nations traded far more with other independent countries, including their European neighbors, than they did with their colonies
-Britain traded more with Latin America and the Unites States than with African colonies
-It was not always the most industrialized, economically powerful nation that took the imperial initiative
4. Political Motives
-Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, a central motivation for building up a strong German navy was to contest Britain’s global power, so dependent on its naval strength, in North Africa, China, and the Ottoman Empire
5. Cultural Incentives
-Empire was presented as the shared symbolic property of the nation, an asset that in theory transcended social class and allowed peasants and workers o cast himself or herself as superior to the nation’s colonial subjective
B. The Scramble for Africa
1. The Berlin Conference
-The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 presided over by the German Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck
Convened to sort out the conflict between the Portuguese and the Belgians over control of the Congo River and to lay the ground rules for colonization
-Seeking to compensate France and Britain for their loss of power in the European arena, and, at the same time, to fuel France British imperial rivalry, Bismarck conceded the bulk of African territories to Britain and France
-The main role of the Berlin Conference was to formally ratify the principle that coastal settlement by a European nation also gave it claim to the hinterlands beyond as long as it could establish authority in the region
-Berlin Conference centralized power in a previously decentralized political landscape
-By using the artificial entity of the “tribe” to designate previously distinct groups of the same region, it permanently reconfigured ethnic and cultural identities in African society
2. The Wars of Conquest
-British profited from local enmity by mobilizing the subjugated Nupe against their Fulani overlords, only to conquer the Nupe soon after
-Europeans were deploying first, rapid-firing breechloaders (repeating rifles) and later, machine guns
-Battle of Omdurman in Sudan in 1898, where field artillery and hand-driven Gatling machine guns allowed Anglo-Egyptian forces to crush Sudanese soldiers
-The troops of Islamic Manlinke ruler Samori Toure armed with up to date European weaponry, staved off French conquest from the mid 1880s to the late 1890s
3. New Imperial Nations
-Accession of Wilhelm II to the German throne and the dismissal of Bismarck ushered in a new era of aggression in German foreign policy
-The Moroccan Crisis of 1905-1906 developed when Germany protested against the Franco-Spanish division of power in the region and demanded a sphere of its own
-Agadir Incident of 1911 erupted when the Kaiser sent a gunboat to the Moroccan port of Agadir in a display of German power meant to intimidate the French
-Horn of Africa, Italy seized Eritrea and Somalia as colonies in 1889, but failed to conquer Abyssinia (Ethiopia) when King Menelik II’s troops soundly defeated an Italian force of 14,500, equipped with inaccurate maps, at the Battle of Adowa in 1896
4. France
-France dominated an enormous swath of sub-Saharan territories known as French West Africa
-France seized the French Congo in Central Africa
-Invaded the Lake Chad region linking its possessions in the west and the north with those in West Africa
-Conquered the island of Madagascar where they established a prosperous sugar plantation based on the forced labor of the local population
5. Britain and the Boer War
-In 1885, the armies of the Mahdi (the Guided One) attacked Khartoum, the Egyptian capital of Sudan and, after a ten-month siege, annihilated Anglo-Egyptian troops led by General Charles Gordon
-At nearby Omdurman, the Madhi established an Islamic state, which thrived for the next 12 years
-In 1898, British troops led by Lord Kitchener handed the Mahdist State a fatal defeat at the battle of Omdurman
-British expanded from trading forts along the Gold Coast, purchased earlier from the Dutch and the Danes, and defeated the Asante to colonize Ghana
-British chartered Royal Niger Company under the leadership of George Goldie, also expanded into Nigeria
-Pressing north from the British Cape Colony, the British fought the Zulus in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1878
-Led by Cecil Rhodes, they took Bechuanaland in 1885, Rhodesia in 1889 and Nyasaland in 1893
-British managed to create a wedge in separating German South West Africa and German East Africa
-And to approach the southern border of the Congo Free State
-Expansion threatened the independent Afrikaner republics north of the Cape Colony, a conflict that ultimately led to the Boer War of 1899-1902, in which 75,000 lives were lost
-Fueled by the discovery there of diamonds and gold
-Establishment in 1910 of the Union of South Africa
-British leaders implemented Afrikaner policies of Apartheid, and the legal segregation of white and black Afrikaners became the law of the land
6. Intra-European Conflict in Africa
-Intra-European imperial clashes
-The Boer War, in which Afrikaners were armed with German weapons, confrontation between Britain and France at Fashoda, on the Nile, in 1898
-Fashoda, British troops marching south from Omdurman met by French expedentiary forces advancing east from the Congo
-French government backed down, distracted by the Dreyfus affair at home
-French agreed to recognize British control of the Nile in return for British recognition of French West Africa
C. Conquest in Asia
1. South and Central Asia
-India emerged as the chief export market for British industrial goods
-British allied with the French and the Ottoman Turks, had fought the Russians directly in the Crimean War but otherwise grappled with the Russian threat through a combination of formal and informal diplomacy known as the “Great Game”
-Ended with the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907 which resolved British and Russian Differences over Persia, Tibet, and Afghanistan, dividing Persia into British and Russian spheres of influence and effectively consolidating Russian power in Central Asia
2. Southeast Asia and the South Pacific
-Although a militant and well-organized Vietnamese resistance movement, known as the “Black Flags”, fought French infiltration (even appealing for help from the Chinese, their former colonial masters) the French prevailed
-France formed the French Indochina Union in 1894
-After defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War, ignited by conflict over the control of Cuba, the US received a number of Spanish territories, including the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam
-After three years of fighting and the capture of the insurrection leader, Emilo Aguinaldo, the United States declared the Philippines its territory
3. East Asia
-In the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War, fought over control of Korea, the Chinese were forced to borrow money from Europe to pay a war indemnity to Japan and in return the Europeans exacted more trade privileges and concessions to build railways
-The 1897 murder of two German missionaries in China led to further concessions
-Germans received a lease of the port of Quindago and the right to build railways in Shandong Province, the Russians took Port Arthur, and the French acquired a lease on Canton Bay and a sphere of influence in southern China
-United States initiated the Open Door policy in 1898
-Nations equal trading rights in all parts of China; it also protected China’s territorial integrity
-Boxer Rebellion in 1900 was when a clandestine society called the “Patriotic Harmonious Fists” organized to protest the corrupting influence of “foreign devils” including missionaries, traders, and soldiers
-Boxers attacked European, American, and Chinese Christians in Shandong Province, sabotaged rail lines, and besieged foreign embassies in Beijing for almost two months
-Chinese nationalist movement led by Sun Yat-sen overthrew the beleaguered Qing Dynasty in 1911
-Sino-Japanese War ended in Chinese defeat, the Japanese annexation of Taiwan, and increased Japanese trade privileges and political influence in Korea
-Victory in the Russo-Japan War
-Seized Russian controlled railways in Manchuria
D. The New Imperial Mission
1. The Failure of Liberal Vision
-Indian Rebellion of 1857 irrevocably changed not only the conception of imperial duty but British expectations of their colonial subjects
-Rudyard Kipling: 1898, “The White Man’s Burden”
2. Darwinism Challenges to the Enlightenment
-Darwin raised the spector of the animal nature—and thus, the fundamental primitivity, of all humans
-Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which held that the natural selection of traits best adapted to survival served as the prime motor of human development, also challenged European
-Darwin argued the superficial physical distinctions between the races emerged early in human history through the process of sexual selection, preferences marked out in the sexual competition for mates
-Sexually selected traits provided no benefit for survival
-Tended either not to change or to evolve much more slowly than other traits
3. Popular Views of Race
-Darwinist Herbert Spencer propagated the notion that the domination and ultimate biological elimination of less fit African societies was the natural—and therefore evolutionary desirable—outcome of the struggle for survival of the fittest
4. Race Science and Eugenics
-Polygenism, or the belief in many human species, had been on the rise in the scientific community since 1800 and dominant since 1850
-Eugenics was also an outgrowth of Darwin’s influence
-Both a science of human heredity and a social program of selective breeding, eugenics was founded by Francis Galton and his colleague Karl Pearson
-Believing the biological differences between races and individuals determined the social order, eugenicists sought to control the process of natural selection and, thereby, to engineer the production of a fitter race
-Using the techniques of biometry, early eugenicists tried to apply statistical analysis to identify the salient traits of the races
-New science of genetics, which identified the gene as the unit of inheritance
5. The Rise of Anthropology
-Edward Burnett Tylor’s Doctrine of Survivals argued that the contemporary savages were evolutionary atavisms whose cultural life provided a window onto the European Past
A. Europe Transformed: Explaining the New Imperialism
1. Technology
-Ironclad warships with steam turbines now spread the power of far more advanced and deadly European weaponry overseas, while the invention of the telegraph radically simplified the logistics of military mobilization from afar
2. Nationalism
-Propelled the new imperialism forward toward a more strident, aggressive, and exclusionary variant
-Now linked to the emergence of new mass politics on the right
3. Economic Factors
-Turn of the century imperial nations viewed their colonies as vital markets for selling European industrial goods, buying raw materials and cash crops, and investing surplus capital
-Germany and the United States were leading industrial powers
-Both Germany and the US had surpassed British steel and iron production and Germany was outselling the British in certain overseas markets
-Industrial depression from 1873 to the early 1890s
-Unstable economic context prompted the view that colonial markets could act as buffers against the fluctuations of global commerce
-Abandon the rhetoric of free trade and endorsed mercantilist policies that—in addition to raising trade barriers in the domestic market—explicitly demarcated the colonies as protected economic spheres
-European nations traded far more with other independent countries, including their European neighbors, than they did with their colonies
-Britain traded more with Latin America and the Unites States than with African colonies
-It was not always the most industrialized, economically powerful nation that took the imperial initiative
4. Political Motives
-Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, a central motivation for building up a strong German navy was to contest Britain’s global power, so dependent on its naval strength, in North Africa, China, and the Ottoman Empire
5. Cultural Incentives
-Empire was presented as the shared symbolic property of the nation, an asset that in theory transcended social class and allowed peasants and workers o cast himself or herself as superior to the nation’s colonial subjective
B. The Scramble for Africa
1. The Berlin Conference
-The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 presided over by the German Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck
Convened to sort out the conflict between the Portuguese and the Belgians over control of the Congo River and to lay the ground rules for colonization
-Seeking to compensate France and Britain for their loss of power in the European arena, and, at the same time, to fuel France British imperial rivalry, Bismarck conceded the bulk of African territories to Britain and France
-The main role of the Berlin Conference was to formally ratify the principle that coastal settlement by a European nation also gave it claim to the hinterlands beyond as long as it could establish authority in the region
-Berlin Conference centralized power in a previously decentralized political landscape
-By using the artificial entity of the “tribe” to designate previously distinct groups of the same region, it permanently reconfigured ethnic and cultural identities in African society
2. The Wars of Conquest
-British profited from local enmity by mobilizing the subjugated Nupe against their Fulani overlords, only to conquer the Nupe soon after
-Europeans were deploying first, rapid-firing breechloaders (repeating rifles) and later, machine guns
-Battle of Omdurman in Sudan in 1898, where field artillery and hand-driven Gatling machine guns allowed Anglo-Egyptian forces to crush Sudanese soldiers
-The troops of Islamic Manlinke ruler Samori Toure armed with up to date European weaponry, staved off French conquest from the mid 1880s to the late 1890s
3. New Imperial Nations
-Accession of Wilhelm II to the German throne and the dismissal of Bismarck ushered in a new era of aggression in German foreign policy
-The Moroccan Crisis of 1905-1906 developed when Germany protested against the Franco-Spanish division of power in the region and demanded a sphere of its own
-Agadir Incident of 1911 erupted when the Kaiser sent a gunboat to the Moroccan port of Agadir in a display of German power meant to intimidate the French
-Horn of Africa, Italy seized Eritrea and Somalia as colonies in 1889, but failed to conquer Abyssinia (Ethiopia) when King Menelik II’s troops soundly defeated an Italian force of 14,500, equipped with inaccurate maps, at the Battle of Adowa in 1896
4. France
-France dominated an enormous swath of sub-Saharan territories known as French West Africa
-France seized the French Congo in Central Africa
-Invaded the Lake Chad region linking its possessions in the west and the north with those in West Africa
-Conquered the island of Madagascar where they established a prosperous sugar plantation based on the forced labor of the local population
5. Britain and the Boer War
-In 1885, the armies of the Mahdi (the Guided One) attacked Khartoum, the Egyptian capital of Sudan and, after a ten-month siege, annihilated Anglo-Egyptian troops led by General Charles Gordon
-At nearby Omdurman, the Madhi established an Islamic state, which thrived for the next 12 years
-In 1898, British troops led by Lord Kitchener handed the Mahdist State a fatal defeat at the battle of Omdurman
-British expanded from trading forts along the Gold Coast, purchased earlier from the Dutch and the Danes, and defeated the Asante to colonize Ghana
-British chartered Royal Niger Company under the leadership of George Goldie, also expanded into Nigeria
-Pressing north from the British Cape Colony, the British fought the Zulus in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1878
-Led by Cecil Rhodes, they took Bechuanaland in 1885, Rhodesia in 1889 and Nyasaland in 1893
-British managed to create a wedge in separating German South West Africa and German East Africa
-And to approach the southern border of the Congo Free State
-Expansion threatened the independent Afrikaner republics north of the Cape Colony, a conflict that ultimately led to the Boer War of 1899-1902, in which 75,000 lives were lost
-Fueled by the discovery there of diamonds and gold
-Establishment in 1910 of the Union of South Africa
-British leaders implemented Afrikaner policies of Apartheid, and the legal segregation of white and black Afrikaners became the law of the land
6. Intra-European Conflict in Africa
-Intra-European imperial clashes
-The Boer War, in which Afrikaners were armed with German weapons, confrontation between Britain and France at Fashoda, on the Nile, in 1898
-Fashoda, British troops marching south from Omdurman met by French expedentiary forces advancing east from the Congo
-French government backed down, distracted by the Dreyfus affair at home
-French agreed to recognize British control of the Nile in return for British recognition of French West Africa
C. Conquest in Asia
1. South and Central Asia
-India emerged as the chief export market for British industrial goods
-British allied with the French and the Ottoman Turks, had fought the Russians directly in the Crimean War but otherwise grappled with the Russian threat through a combination of formal and informal diplomacy known as the “Great Game”
-Ended with the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907 which resolved British and Russian Differences over Persia, Tibet, and Afghanistan, dividing Persia into British and Russian spheres of influence and effectively consolidating Russian power in Central Asia
2. Southeast Asia and the South Pacific
-Although a militant and well-organized Vietnamese resistance movement, known as the “Black Flags”, fought French infiltration (even appealing for help from the Chinese, their former colonial masters) the French prevailed
-France formed the French Indochina Union in 1894
-After defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War, ignited by conflict over the control of Cuba, the US received a number of Spanish territories, including the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam
-After three years of fighting and the capture of the insurrection leader, Emilo Aguinaldo, the United States declared the Philippines its territory
3. East Asia
-In the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War, fought over control of Korea, the Chinese were forced to borrow money from Europe to pay a war indemnity to Japan and in return the Europeans exacted more trade privileges and concessions to build railways
-The 1897 murder of two German missionaries in China led to further concessions
-Germans received a lease of the port of Quindago and the right to build railways in Shandong Province, the Russians took Port Arthur, and the French acquired a lease on Canton Bay and a sphere of influence in southern China
-United States initiated the Open Door policy in 1898
-Nations equal trading rights in all parts of China; it also protected China’s territorial integrity
-Boxer Rebellion in 1900 was when a clandestine society called the “Patriotic Harmonious Fists” organized to protest the corrupting influence of “foreign devils” including missionaries, traders, and soldiers
-Boxers attacked European, American, and Chinese Christians in Shandong Province, sabotaged rail lines, and besieged foreign embassies in Beijing for almost two months
-Chinese nationalist movement led by Sun Yat-sen overthrew the beleaguered Qing Dynasty in 1911
-Sino-Japanese War ended in Chinese defeat, the Japanese annexation of Taiwan, and increased Japanese trade privileges and political influence in Korea
-Victory in the Russo-Japan War
-Seized Russian controlled railways in Manchuria
D. The New Imperial Mission
1. The Failure of Liberal Vision
-Indian Rebellion of 1857 irrevocably changed not only the conception of imperial duty but British expectations of their colonial subjects
-Rudyard Kipling: 1898, “The White Man’s Burden”
2. Darwinism Challenges to the Enlightenment
-Darwin raised the spector of the animal nature—and thus, the fundamental primitivity, of all humans
-Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which held that the natural selection of traits best adapted to survival served as the prime motor of human development, also challenged European
-Darwin argued the superficial physical distinctions between the races emerged early in human history through the process of sexual selection, preferences marked out in the sexual competition for mates
-Sexually selected traits provided no benefit for survival
-Tended either not to change or to evolve much more slowly than other traits
3. Popular Views of Race
-Darwinist Herbert Spencer propagated the notion that the domination and ultimate biological elimination of less fit African societies was the natural—and therefore evolutionary desirable—outcome of the struggle for survival of the fittest
4. Race Science and Eugenics
-Polygenism, or the belief in many human species, had been on the rise in the scientific community since 1800 and dominant since 1850
-Eugenics was also an outgrowth of Darwin’s influence
-Both a science of human heredity and a social program of selective breeding, eugenics was founded by Francis Galton and his colleague Karl Pearson
-Believing the biological differences between races and individuals determined the social order, eugenicists sought to control the process of natural selection and, thereby, to engineer the production of a fitter race
-Using the techniques of biometry, early eugenicists tried to apply statistical analysis to identify the salient traits of the races
-New science of genetics, which identified the gene as the unit of inheritance
5. The Rise of Anthropology
-Edward Burnett Tylor’s Doctrine of Survivals argued that the contemporary savages were evolutionary atavisms whose cultural life provided a window onto the European Past